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Abstract

Ambitious and scalable startups are a key source of employment, innovation and productivity growth in Europe. However, evidence shows that many startups face difficulties in moving from early stage to scaleup, i.e., from early stage to ventures attracting more than €1 million in funding, resulting in what is known as the "valley of death". Investors at an early stage, generally prefer to invest locally, but there is not much evidence regarding later stages. The aim of the paper is to investigate to what extent scaleups attract capital from their home cities. To analyze the performance of scaleups and investors, data has been retrieved from Dealroom.co in November 2022 on more than 19,000 scaleups, compared to the attributes of the more than 30,000 European investors (VC, CVC, Angel) mapped to Functional Urban Areas (FUA) according to the OECD-EU classification. We created a local/non-local investor ratio variable based on the aggregated data and by using the Ridge regression - due to the high multicollinearity - we built a model to predict an estimate of total funding. Preliminary results show a difference between emerging cities and already successful scaleup cities. In underperforming ecosystems, local investors are more likely to be the main contributors, but in globally open, large-scale cities, the investor market is also more open.